Scars: Part One

 

I suppose I have scars and I am old enough to feel numbness where there used to be sensations. Let me remove my outer cloak of wellbeing for a moment, and I can show you some irreparable damage:

This damage, unfortunately, began when I was a tiny fellow. My imagination was already excited enough by holding a guitar and toy cars from as far back as my memory goes. I had an older sister and an even older brother. We had a comfortable home to live in; and at the time, it did not occur to me that it was a very simple home, as compared to others. We had concrete floors and cinderblock walls. There was not much paint and even less décor in general. But in my earliest memories, I suppose I thought of adequacy as a form of excellency. If the house was shelter, and if it was safe, I felt it served its purpose as well as any house.

We were not hungry. I do not remember ever going to bed without enough food to satisfy my needs. That, of course, is not a scar. In fact, I have not gotten there yet

I have memories of deep ruts in our dirt driveway. I remember large portions of our property, where grass did not grow when I was a little boy. There might be a clump of grass here and another one ten feet away, but it was mostly dirt. We even had debris where a car-garage sits now. That area had been a hollowed out ditch, where my father and his brothers would take trash from the farmhouse. Before I was born, and after my dad built our house, the “landfill” was moved to a place, deeper in the woods and better concealed by the forest around it.

If you thought this was a part of the scarring I referred to earlier, you’d still be jumping the gun. The dirt and debris was not a crisis for me. Without green lawns to compare it to, my playground seemed sufficient to me. In fact, when I wanted to play with plastic soldiers and tiny metal cars, having the red clay on which to fabricate my towns and battlefields was perfection in my opinion. I gravitated to the very areas one might now think of as desolate or rough. If you have never carved your tiny villages through red dirt, while using clumps of weeds or grass as forests and jungles, and having access to all kinds of rusting debris for your structures, you might mistake this memory as a bad one, but you would be mistaken indeed; it remains as one of my most delightful, core memories.

We even had the luxury of our own creek. I felt sorry for anyone who did not have access to their own, miniature river. We had sandy areas on some of the shoreline and, as far as I could tell, these were beaches. The terrain was rugged down by the creek, and the creek itself was winding. There were trees which leaned out over the creek and we even had a rope on one of those. One of the leaning-trees had a perfect series of random burls growing up the “climbing-side” as if put there on purpose. When climbing that tree, you’d find a knot every time you needed one for advancing. At the base of that same tree, there was a perfectly flat, sandy area, which would have been an ideal location for a camp. We played there often, but I am nearly certain that natives probably had some kind of dwelling there, maybe just 150 years earlier than my own childhood; for we are in the mid to late 1960’s at the time of this wonderful memory. For the record, the “removal” of natives was mostly executed in 1838. Which is just a short, 130 years earlier than my own recollection of the same land they’d been removed from. I am not digressing; my dad was very informed about the Trail of Tears and the war that was fought among the newer settlers in the 1850’s and 60’s. He made sure we were aware of this history as well.

As if by divine planning, our little home sat in a holler, near the creek, and just down the hill from my grandmother’s house, where, from our perspective, the sun sat on her roof each night. It was almost as if the sun would go down into the old farmhouse and become a lamp that we could see after dark. We could even infer the movements of my grandmother and my aunt Mable, when shadows made the lamp flicker like a flame.

Just to the south of grandma’s house, and still to the west of ours, a tiny trailer-home sat in another holler. This was where my Uncle Roy lived. He was married to Aunt Mable, but she spent most of her days and nights with her mother, my grandmother. Roy, therefore, was practically an old bachelor, still toned by his time in Europe, which was just twenty years prior to the memory I am now recalling. Roy was a mountain of a man to me. He wore overalls and boots. He was missing some teeth and most of his hair by then. He spoke Appalachian English, which had deep Scottish-Irish roots, with Roy’s personal brand having been shaped by his family’s movement into the foothills, around Cedartown, Georgia, as far back as the early 1800’s. Some of the McBrides and McBrydes still live in that area to this day. For Roy, tomatoes were maters and Marietta, where he worked, was called, May-retta.

As rugged as he was, Roy was my anchor. I can still hear him, over half a century later, saying, “Hey little buddy.” I was his little buddy for sure. I was the son he never had. He wanted to instill every value he could into me. He taught me about guns and knives and even tillers, as if we were in a hurry to get through these lessons. I think I probably communicated to Roy, exactly how I felt about him, but never with words. I think that when he heard my little feet, stepping up onto his metal steps, he had to know that he was my hero.

Without going into the drama yet, I will say that having Roy around was vital to me in those developing years. My dad was there in those days, but he was lost and trying to find his own way. Alcohol was involved and this prevented me from discovering the man behind those drinks back then. While dad was dousing his own, deep wounds, Roy was available to me. I would not be here without him.

In early 1971, when I was six and a half, Roy became very ill. He moved up to the middle bedroom of the farmhouse, so Mable could see to his needs. I was old enough to know that he was not well, but still too young to know that people do not always recover. His voice became a whisper. I pulled up a chair and sat beside his bed every evening. Already in the practice of modeling my world after Roy, I would whisper too. “Hey little buddy.” He would whisper.

“When you get better,” I whispered, “We can work in the garden.”

Uncle Roy would smile and say, “Yes, we will.”

One day, I asked Roy, “Can we go outside?”

He said, “Yes.” And slowly rose up from his bed. He was already out of breath when he stood and walked a few feet to the exterior door near his bed. He had to sit on the steps and that’s as far as we could go. In a few minutes, he had to get back to the bed, but I think he wanted me to see that he was trying.

I would check on him every day. “Are you better?” I would ask. I was sure the rest and medications would eventually do their magic.

“Some.” He would say.

And finally, this brings me to the first, significant scar. On February 16, 1971, just ten days after his 63rd birthday, when Uncle Roy was the age I am as of this writing, he drew his final breath.

I was at school when Roy passed away. It was on a Tuesday morning. When I got off the bus, in front of the old farmhouse, with Myra, my sister, I went straight onto the screened porch and dropped my books off on the old glider, which still sits where it was that day. The house was filled with mostly aunts, but that did not strike me as unusual; Grandma Coker always had visitors.

Weaving past the ladies there, I heard Mable ask, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to go see Roy.” I said.

I will never forget the wailing chorus of women, seemingly triggered by something I said.

“Roy is gone.” Said Mable.

Still not familiar with this routine occurrence, I was still curious. “Where?”

And the wailing resumed, as loud as before.

My Mom said, “Roy has gone to heaven.”

She may as well have said that he’d died. It had the same impact on me and tears blur this very text as I type these words. I have wished someone had told me that Roy’s death was to be expected. I knew that our last conversation had ended with, “See you later.” And I have always felt it should have been, “Goodbye Uncle Roy. I love you.”